The Evergreen. A Northern Seasonal. Published in the Lawnmarket of Edinburgh by Patrick Geddes and Colleagues. (London: Fisher Unwin, 1895).

IT is not often that a reviewer is called upon to write art criticism in the columns of NATURE. But the circumstances of the “Evergreen” are peculiar; it is pub- lished with a certain scientific sanction as the expression of a coming scientific Renascence of Art, and it is impossible to avoid glancing at its aesthetic merits. It is a semi- annual periodical emanating from the biological school of St. Andrews University. Mr. J. Arthur Thomson assists with the proem and the concluding article (“The Scots Renascence”), and other significant work in the volume is from the pen of Prof. Patrick Geddes. It may be assumed that a large section of the public will accept this volume as being representative of the younger generation of biological workers, and as indicating the aesthetic tendencies of a scientific training. What in- justice may be done thereby a glance at the initial Almanac will show. In this page of the “Scots Renascence” design the beautiful markings of the carapace of a crab and the exquisite convolutions of a ram’s horn are alike replaced by unmeaning and clumsy spirals, the delicate outlines of a butterfly body by a gross shape like a soda- water bottle; its wings are indicated by a the three sausage- shaped excrescences on either side, and the vegetable forms in the decorative border are deprived of all variety and sinuosity in favour of a system of cast-iron semi- circular curves. Now, as a matter of fact, provided there is no excess of diagram, his training should render the genuine biologist more acutely sensitive to these ugly and unmeaning distortions than the average educated man. Neither does a biological training blind the eye to the quite fortuitous arrangement of the black masses in Mr. Duncan’s studies in the art of Mr. Beardsley, to the clumsy line of Mr. Mackie’s reminiscences of Mr. Walter Crane, or to the amateurish quality of Mr. Burn-Murdoch. And when Mr. Riccardo Stephens honours Herrick on his intention rather than his execution, and Mr. Laubach, rejoicing “with tabret and string” at the advent of spring, bleats

it must not be supposed that the frequenters of the biological laboratory, outside the circle immediately about Prof. Patrick Geddes, are more profoundly stirred than they are when Mr. Kipling, full of knowledge and power, sings of the wind and the sea and the heart of the natural man.

But enough has been said of the artistic merits of this volume. Regarded as anything more than the first efforts of amateurs in art and literature — and it makes that claim — it is bad from cover to cover; and even the covers are bad. No mitigated condemnation will meet the circumstances of the case. Imagine the New English Art Club propounding a Scientific Renascence in its leisure moments! Of greater concern to the readers of NATURE than the fact that a successful pro- fessor may be an indifferent art editor, is the attempt on the part of two biologists — real responsible biologists – writing for the unscientific public, to represent Biology as having turned upon its own philosophical implications. Mr. Thomson, for instance, tells his readers that “the conception of the Struggle for Existence as Nature’s sole method of progress,” “was to be sure a libel projected upon nature, but is had enough truth in it to be mis- chievous for a while.” So zoologists honour their greatest! “Science,” he says, has perceived “how false to natural fact the theory was.” “It has shown how primordial, how organically imperative the social virtues are; how love, not egoism, is the motive which the final history of every species justifies.” And so on to some beautiful socialistic sentiment and anticipations of the “domin- ance of a common civic ideal, which to naturalists is known as a Symbiosis.” And Prof. Geddes writes tumultuously in the same vein — a kind of pulpit science — many hopeful things of “Renascence,” and the “Elixir of Life.”

Now there is absolutely no justification for these sweep- ing assertions, this frantic hopefulness, this attempt to belittle the giants of the Natural Selection period of bio- logical history. There is nothing in Symbiosis or in any other group of phenomena to warrant the state- ment that the representation of all life as a Struggle for Existence is a libel on Nature. Because some species have abandoned fighting in open order, each family for itself, as some of the larger carnivora do, for a fight in masses after the fashion of the ants, because the fungus fighting its brother fungus has armed itself with an auxiliary alga, because man instead of killing his cattle at sight preserves them against his convenience, and fights with advertisements and legal process instead of with flint instruments, is life therefore any the less a battle-field? Has anything arisen to show that the seed of the unfit need not perish, that a species may wheel into line with the new conditions without the generous assistance of Death, that where the life and breeding of every indi- vidual in a species is about equally secure, a degenerative process must not inevitably supervene? As a matter of fact Natural Selection grips us more grimly than it ever did, because doubts thrown upon the inheritance of acquired characteristics have deprived us of our trust in education as a means of redemption for decadent families. In our hearts we all wish that the case was not so, we all hate Death and his handiwork; but the business of science is not to keep up the courage of men, but to tell the truth. And biological science in the study still faces this dilemma, that the individual in a non-combatant species, if such a thing as a non-combatant species ever exist, a species, that is to say, perfectly adapted to static con- ditions, is, by virtue of its perfect reactions, a mechanism, and that in a species not in a state of equilibrium, a species undergoing modification, a certain painful stress must weigh upon all its imperfectly adapted individuals, and death be busy among the most imperfect. And where your animal is social, the stress is still upon the group of imper- fect individuals constituting the imperfect herd or anthill, or what not — they merely suffer by wholesale instead of by retails. In brief, a static species is mechanical, an evolving species suffering — no line of escape from that impasse has as yet presented itself. The names of the sculptor who carves out the new forms of life are, and so far as human science goes at present they must ever be, Pain and Death. And the phenomena of degeneration rob one of any confidence that the new forms will be in any case or in a majority of cases “higher” (by any standard except present adaptation to circumstances) than the old.

Messrs. Geddes and Thomson have advanced nothing to weaken these convictions, and their attitude is alto- gether amazingly unscientific. Mr. Thomson talks of the Gospel of the Resurrection and “that charming girl Proserpina,” and Baldur the Beautiful and Dornröschen, that hammers away at the great god Pan, inviting all and sundry to “light the Beltane fires” — apparently with the dry truths of science — “and keep the Floralia,” while Prof. Geddes relies chiefly on Proserpine and the Alchemy of Life for his literary effects. Intercalated among these writings are amateurish short stories about spring, “de- scriptive articles” of the High School Essay type, poetry and illustrations such as we have already dealt with. In this manner is the banner of the “Scots Renascence,” and “Bio-optimism” unfurled by these industrious in- vestigators in biology. It will not appeal to science students, but to that large and important class of the community which trims its convictions to its amiable sentiments, it may appear as a very desirable mitigation of the rigour of, what Mr. Buchanan has very aptly called, the Calvinism of science.H.G. WELLS.